Gesammelte Werke
What is wrong about the argument is not that it sounds Hitlerian, but that it is infantile and expresses a general reversion of thinking which goes infinitely beyond the sphere of the arts – and hatred of thinking, hostility against the development of independent thought is what makes for Fascism.
The infantile twist is the forthright identification of ugly and beautiful in art with ugly and beautiful in reality, an identification in the style of the Hays Office which regards every unpolished villain on the screen as an encouragement of robbery on the street. Thinking is endangered of losing the power of discriminating between imagery and reality. Goethe, who is supposed to have been a classicist, as well as Hegel, the conservative, knew that speaking out the negative, facing catastrophe and calling it by its name, has something wholesome and helpful in itself which could never be achieved by the pretense of a harmony borrowed from the surface phenomena and leaving the essence untouched.
It is just this taboo of expressing the essence, the depth of things, this compulsion of keeping to the visible, the fact, the datum and accepting it unquestioningly which has survived as one of the most sinister cultural heritages of the Fascist era, and there is real danger of a kind of pink pseudo-realism sweeping the world after this war, which may be more efficient but which is certainly not fundamentally superior to the art exhibitions commandeered by the Nazis.
Art should put against those restorative tendencies, even if they are clothed in terms of Parisian neo-classicism, the word of an Anglo-Saxon philosopher who certainly cannot be blamed for
Kulturbolschewismus,
namely Francis Bradley: »If everything is bad, it may be good to know the worst.«
Simultaneously however, we should not underrate the issue of aloofness and non-conformity of music, and of arts in general, with regard to its political importance. For this aloofness did not only keep it away from the market but also created a kind of resentment which belongs to the most significant phenomena of the German pre-Fascist cultural climate and which has its strong counterpart in anti-intellectualism and anti-highbrowism all over the world.
This resentment as well as the musical decultivation of the German middle classes resulted in certain ill-defined collectivistic tendencies of the pre-Fascist era. They found their quasi-positive expression in the so-called musical folk and youth movement. During the
Third Reich,
this movement came into a certain antagonism with the Party and seems to have been abolished or absorbed by the
Hitler Youth.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that this movement had a strong affinity to the spirit of Nazism. No need to stress such obvious aspects as the connection between this musical collectivism and the Nazi folk ideology. But there are less obvious features to which I should like to draw your attention.
There is a strong repressive trend throughout this musical collectivism, a hatred against the individual, the supposedly refined and sophisticated. This hatred is an expression of envy of those whose individuality could not truly develop, rather than a desire for a true solidarity of men which would pre-suppose those very individual qualities which are taboo to the agitators of musical collectivism. There is, moreover, the wish for simplicity at any price, the contempt of the
métier,
the unwillingness to learn anything that requires persistent intellectual efforts – a kind of glorification of the supposedly plain, average man which may be transformed into a weapon against anyone and anything that does not conform to his standards.
There is, above all, the display of an aggressive spirit of community as an end in itself, played up artificially so as not to allow any questioning of its real meaning. The idea of collectivity is made a fetish, glorified as such, and only loosely connected with concrete social contents which may easily be changed with every turn of
Realpolitik.
This last element is perhaps the most important one. It bears witness to the calculated, synthetic nature of this supposed folk music. The more it pretends to be the expression of »we the people«, the more certain we may be that it is actually dictated by very particularistic clique interests, intolerant, aggressive and greedy for power.
I have so far discussed underlying tendencies of German culture as manifested in the field of music which prepared the
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